Magi Mike’s Blog

J C Flugel, an eminent psychologist of the mid twentieth century, pointed out (Man, Morals and Society):

When those who assert the existence of God, at the same time reveal that they ardently desire Him to exist, we are justified in feeling a little skeptical.

The skepticism arises because one has to suspect “wishful thinking” is the basis of their assertion. The desire that God exists burns so furiously in the believer’s busom that they convince themselves it must be so. It is a self deception.

There is another, a better reason for skepticism, that of the scientist. The scientist is skeptical on principle about any claim that is not tested until such time as it is adequately tested and shown to be so. It is a principle that excludes all self deception and gullibility, which otherwise would lead us to accept whatever we choose or prefer out of the many available explanations whether possible or impossible.

Added to the skeptical principle in science is the principle of Ockham’s Razor, introduced in the later middle ages by a cleric in an attempt to eliminate what might be called Sufism—the multiplication of “explanatory” entities—from Christian theology. It found its most valuable place in science in successfully keeping scientific hypotheses to a minimum of complexity.

So, for example, the believer will say the postulation of God explains inexplicable things like the existence of the universe, why we are here, what we do after death, and so on. It does no such thing, and violates both the skeptical principle and Ockham’s Razor.

Take the case of the creation of the universe. We can certainly observe the world in which we live, but we cannot observe a God. The believer invents an entity, God, for which there is no direct evidence, to explain a very large and evident entity that we know does exist, then says that the nonentity created the large and evident entity, QED. On the skeptical principle, we have to reject the argument because there is still no evidence for the imaginary entity, God, other than our new conjecture that He created the universe. That is circular. God is a fudge! His imagined supernatural nature is another fudge, one which explains why God cannot be detected!

And we now have two entities to consider, the universe which we confirm in our daily lives, and God, which is a fudge to explain the universe, but otherwise leaves no traces anywhere. We are actually no better off, because, even if we are convinced by the fudgy explanation, we still have something to explain—God. Contrary to the clerical Razor of Ockham, we have mutiplied entities from one to two, and are left as badly off as before with an explanation for one of them still needed.

That, of course, is no problem to the Christian, devoid of any need for principle, but overflowing with Sufi answers. The existence of God needs no explanation because He is eternal, He lives forever and is the Prime Mover of everything else. Yet God is explained by introducing a new principle, that of an eternal life for God. But, if God, the imaginary entity, can be eternal, we are left with the question of why the universe itself could not be eternal, again using Ockham’s razor to cut out the superfluous entity with the astonishing properties it has to have for it to perform all these miracles.

The universe is before us. If it were eternal, then that would suffice to remove the need for the postulate of God. The believer will jump forward full of agitation, telling us that science has shown the universe has a beginning in the Big Bang. It is not eternal, so we must go for the believer’s hypothesis of God. Well, if believers could formulate God mathematically, we might begin to be convinced, but so far they cannot. Science however has found and tested a large number of mathematical theorems that can still offer us naturalistic explanations, even if they are getting more and more wonderful, beginning to look like Sufi science, perhaps, with the difference that these mathematics work!

The discovery of complex numbers allows physicists to postulate virtual events, events that take place in complex time. Maybe complex time is God, for the Big Bang has been explained as no bang with the use of complex time. We think of time as being linear, starting from the Big Bang, but complex time yields a multidimensional time, not just the linear one, and that means time need not begin at all. The linear time that we experience is an illusion, and what seems like a bursting forth of vast amounts of energy in linear time is more of a continous pulsation in virtual time.

Then again, there is the theory of quantum mechanics which has led to truly wonderful things, not least of which is the notion of the multiverse. It seems that all events possible can happen somewhere in this multiverse which therefore is indeed conceptually infinite, though there may be a limit set by the graininess of space and time themselves, but even so there could be so many universes withing the multiverse, that even God would need assistance. Unless of course we postulate a multitude of Gods serving each possible universe, and perhaps a multi-God in change of the lot!

Science is apparently confirming that something transcends the universe we can observe directly, just as believers have believed. It is the multiverse. Perhaps that is God, but it is not a personal God at all. If anything, it is like the God of the Stoics and the Deists, a set of transcendent laws that even the believer’s local God must be subject to.

According to polling data, most Americans doubt that evolution is true, and many biology courses and textbooks dwell on the mechanisms of evolution—natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow—but see no reason to repeat the evidence for. How do we know that species change?

In a slim volume, The Evidence for Evolution, University of Chicago (2011), University of Utah anthropologist, Alan R Rogers, fills in pieces that were missing from Darwin’s argument. He aims to answer persistent and inaccurate arguments against evolution with scientific evidence that was not available in Charles Darwin’s day.

Rogers points out that Darwin didn’t know about genetics, continental drift or the age of the Earth. He had never seen a species change. He had no idea whether it was even possible for a species to divide into two. He knew of no transitional fossils and of almost no human fossils. Rogers says:

[Later] evidence might have gone the other way. It might have refuted Darwin’s theory, but instead we have 150 years of evidence all of which supports his theory. My book tells the story of these discoveries.

Rogers has been teaching courses on evolution since the 1980s. Mostly, he didn’t say much about the evidence that evolution actually happens, feeling the issue was settled scientifically more than a century ago, and anyone interested could read the original books like The Origin of Species. The emphasis for today’s students was on what was still not properly known and what had been newly discovered. Classes and textbooks emphasize the aspects of evolution that are being actively researched. Rogers changed his approach in 2006 after he read a poll reporting that only about half of Americans believe humans evolved:

It occurred to me after reading this poll that it didn’t make much sense to teach students about the intricacies of evolution if they don’t believe that evolution happens in the first place. So, I decided that my introductory classes henceforth were going to have a week or two on the evidence for evolution, and I started looking for a text.

Rogers determined to write an “easy to read” book that gave modern support for evolution, without it being either too advanced or taking too much for granted:

I’m trying to convince skeptics that evolution really happened. If they’re skeptics, then as soon as I get to the point where I say, “trust me”, they’re going to say “no. The reason I’m skeptical is because I don’t trust you”.

Rogers hopes The Evidence for Evolution will encourage readers to think critically. He thinks it will be valuable to evolution skeptics as well as those already convinced. Evolutionists should be prepared to offer evidence when challenged, and even people familiar with biology will have something to learn. Despite spending 30 years studying evolution, Rogers still found material that was new to him.

All scientists are skeptics if they’re any good, but they’re not stubborn about it. In science, you have to be able to change your mind when confronted with evidence. It seems to me that learning that skill is important, not only for scientists, but for everybody. It makes us better citizens.

With The Evidence for Evolution, Alan R Rogers provides a straightforward text that gives the evidence for evolution. He gives the creationists’ arguments and offers the best evidence to counter them. He covers changes within species, which are much easier to see and believe, to much larger ones, such as from fish to amphibians, or from land mammals to whales. For each case, he explains evidence illustrating the changes, including fossils, DNA, and radioactive isotopes. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge but also shows how we can be sure.

Alan Rogers addresses the political controversy over the theory of evolution—there’s no longer any scientific controversy—in the best scientific spirit—with evidence and logic. For anyone with an open mind, a curiosity about the natural world, and a desire to see controversies settled with evidence rather than rhetoric, this is an invaluable contribution and a fascinating read.

Steven Pinker, Harvard University

We are always reading that Americans are religious—more religious than the people of other industrialized countries. Two in five Americans say they regularly attend church services. 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, and over 70 percent know that God exists. The simple story obtained by believing self reported religosity was rather obviously contrasted by the empty churches in parts of many cities. Then C Kirk Hadaway, director of research at the Episcopal Church, estimated that actual church attendances for Protestants and Catholics are approximately half of those reported.

Shankar Vedantam has pointed out that asking people whether they attend church is an unreliable way of getting religious answers. Instead of asking about church attendance, it is better to ask people to describe exactly how they spent their time on a typical sunday. This way, Philip Brenner, of the University of Michigan, found that the US and Canada both over reported religious attendance. It turns out that Americans are no more religious than people in other developed countries. The tendency to exaggerate church attendance made the US and Canada seem different. Actually, Americans attended church about as often as Italians and Slovenians, and a little more than the British and Germans.

So what is different about them is that they want others to think they are more religious than they are. They are much more stereotyped, because religion in the USA is still falsely considered a measure of people’s worth. Young people today might think it more important to know how many Facebook “friends” you have—you must be a good person to have a thousand Facebook “friends”. Equally, for many Americans, you must be a good person to attend church so regularly.

In other industrialized nations in the twentieth century this notion eroded because the majority realized church attendance was too often hypocritical, not sincere, the very thing that most Americans failed to notice. Americans continued to feel obliged to show they were religious. They still fear that unless they affirm their religiosity—such as by regular church attendance—they will be seen as less of a person than otherwise. Moreover, when you are in reality a villain, you have even more incentive to beef up your church attendance record! Therein lies the hypocrisy.

It seems that new research from Rice University has found that more than 20 percent of atheist scientists are spiritual. 72 of the 275 natural and social scientists interviewed said they have a spirituality that is consistent with science, although they are not formally religious. If this is the measure quoted as 20 percent, it is actually 26 percent!

Elaine Howard Ecklund, assistant professor of sociology at Rice, is the chief author of the study which she conducted with Elizabeth Long, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Rice. Ecklund says:

Scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs. Spirituality pervades both the religious and atheist thought. It’s not an either/or. This challenges the idea that scientists, and other groups we typically deem as secular, are devoid of those big “Why am I here?” questions. They too have these basic human questions and a desire to find meaning. There’s spirituality among even the most secular scientists. These spiritual atheist scientists are seeking a core sense of truth through spirituality—one that is generated by and consistent with the work they do as scientists.

Apparently these scientists see both science and spirituality as part of their individual quest for meaning without faith that can never be final. Their spirituality is congruent with science and separate from religion. Spirituality is open to a scientific journey requiring empirical evidence, religion demands the “absence of empirical evidence”.

The terms scientists most used to describe religion include “organized, communal, unified and collective”. The terms used to describe spirituality include “individual, personal and personally constructed”. All of the respondents who used collective or individual terms attributed the collective terms to religion and the individual terms to spirituality. Ecklund said:

In their sense of things, being spiritual motivates them to provide help for others, and it redirects the ways in which they think about and do their work as scientists.

The spiritual scientists saw boundaries between themselves and their nonspiritual colleagues because their spirituality facilitated engagement with the world around them. Such engagement, according to the spiritual scientists, generated a different approach to research and teaching. While nonspiritual colleagues might focus on their own research at the expense of student interaction, spiritual scientists’ sense of spiritualty provides nonnegotiable reasons for making sure that they help struggling students succeed.

Much of the comment on the study by the authors is waffle. What is valid in it is not original, and what is original is not valid. It really is not surprising. The lead author seems to have done the research under a grant of $283,549 from the John Templeton Foundation to study “Religion and Spirituality among Natural and Social Scientists at Elite Research Universities”, and must have felt under pressure to find something to please the sponsor.

The researchers seem to have used the results of the research to define what they mean by spirituality, rather than defining the terms they wished to study first. Thus, it is a curious finding that only the science professors who do their teaching job properly are spiritual. It seems to mean that conscientiousness is at least one facet of spirituality. If so, the nonspiritual teachers could never get tenure, and so selection would push up the ratio of these mysterious spiritual ones in any science faculty.

In fact, the word “spirituality” defies definition, it is so meaningless. Etymologically it derives from the Latin for “breath”. Breath relates to life for which breath is essential in mammals, including humans. It is an early metaphor for life, actual breathing life, and came to be associated with an immaterial entity that gave life to inanimate matter. Thus God made Adam of clay and “breathed” life into him! The life that God has breathed into him and all of us is literally “breath” or spirit (spiritus).

Thus to accept the concept of spirituality is to accept a dualism that science can find no evidence for. When there is no evidence for any proposed phenomenon or hypothesis, the null hypothesis is that it does not exist, not that it does exist. That is scientific skepticism.

Some scientists might not think about these things too much because they are irrelevant to the practice of science, so some might not have strictly coherent views on spirituality. Even more so, given that the term, quite apart from its linguistic origins, is now so widely interpreted that no two people ever are speaking about the same spirituality. Proof is the discussion that the PhysOrg.com report of this research generated. Approaching 200 comments submitted showed it superbly. Few posts were talking about the same thing.

It seems, though, that a lot of people did think that a spiritual experience was a personal—subjective—sense of awe. It is this sense of awe that many scientists who are not a bit religious may be willing to describe as spiritual. It has nothing to do with religious belief, and the attempt of religions to hijack it as the presence of God, or whatever, is typical religious dishonesty. It is almost invariably a sense of awe at Nature or something natural, like a childbirth. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, says his “Road to Damascus” experience came when he suddenly came across a frozen waterfall, an awesome but entirely natural phsnomenon. It should have strengthened his desire to investigate Nature, rather than stimulating his return to God. However, the wonder of human architecture, say, as in the spectacle of the interior of a cathedral, can induce it too. That was undoubtedly the objective of the medieval bishops in building such wonderful buildings.

Perhaps Professors Ecklund and Long will do a much more thorough study with a more representative sample, proper definitions, and greater objectivity. Let’s not hold our spiritus! A Templeton Prize might be awaiting.

Scientifically, or any other way, we cannot prove anything that is imaginary or simply a thought. Centaurs, vampires, werewolves, philosophers’ stones, elixirs of life, fairies, demons, angels, gods, God—such things can be imagined, but cannot be proved because they are purely imaginary, figments, and so do not exist in reality to leave behind any evidence for them. The absence of evidence for them is evidence! It is evidence against them.

A basis of science, a feature without which it could not work, is skepticism, one does not postulate anything for which there is no evidence. Its opposite is credulity, the inclination to believe anything on the least of evidence or none! Related to skepticism is the principle of Ockham’s Razor, or Parsimony, which says that one postulates only what is necessary and feasible—one does not glibly invent things. Using these principles science has no need to hypothesize God. Nor does it have to disprove God, an entity for which it has no need, any more than it has to disprove centaurs or elixirs of life, etc, or needs them.

An agnostic is deliberately wavering, wavering out of choice and not reason. To claim there is no evidence either way, is simply to say there is no evidence, and so to be scientific and skeptical the postulate of God has to be rejected until convincing evidence forces a reassessment. It is impossible to be simultaneously a scientist and a believer in God, so long as science cannot accommodate credulity. Credulous science becomes religion!

Moreover, if God existed and has the effect on the material world that believers think He has, He is necessarily leaving evidence behind. Science ought to be able to detect it. As Victor Stenger shows, nothing so far suggests anywhere in the universe that we have checked out that requires a God to explain it. Science is highly successful at explaining things without the hypothesis of God. So, if God exists, He is not manifestly changing the world in any discernible way. Worship and prayer are having no effect.

Of course, a purely mental God, a purely imaginary or psychological phenomenon, can effect one. It is a form of autosuggestion. That is probably why people are able to convince themselves that God does answer prayers. It is the Placebo God.

Clint Witchalls writes in the UK Independent that a woman and author of two books on childcare, made two girls and a 21 year old woman, whom she had brought from Nigeria, toil for 21 hours a day in her London home and tortured them when their work did not satisfy her. The were her slaves. The youngest girl was 11 years old. She was Lucy Adeniji, an evangelical Christian. The judge sentenced her to eleven years in jail, describing her as…

…an evil woman. I have no doubt you have ruined these two girls’ lives. They will suffer from the consequences of the behaviour you meted out to them for the rest of their lives.

Evil is a loaded word whether used as a noun or an adjective. It relates to the work of the Devil, implying wickedness beyond redemption. In modern American usage it implies that nothing less than death is a suitable punishment. For Bush, the Evil Empire had to be bombed into submission. Its evilness justified the killing and destruction, and so it was that a million or so, mainly innocent Iraqis died. The Taliban in Afghanistan are evil, so they can be bombed in the same way, and pilotless drones can penetrate into Pakistan—another evil place for many Americans—killing innocents, and sometimes an intended target, if we believe that the innocents are not intended as targets.

Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, argues in Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty, that the term evil is unscientific and unhelpful. “Evil” is not an explanation of wrongdoing. Science provides a more satisfactory explanation for evil and that explanation is lack of empathy. Evil is “empathy erosion”. People who lack empathy see others as mere objects. Baron-Cohen writes:

Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.

Baron-Cohen has found that empathy, like IQ, is normally distributed in human populations—that is, it is a bell curve. Most people have a typically human level of empathy—the peak of the bell shape, and less have greater and lesser levels of it. At the extremes, few people have none or excessive amounts of it. Using standard deviation from the mean, the curve can be split into six sections, and these Baron-Cohen lists as the degrees of empathy. Using a questionnaire, everyone can be classified on the EC (Empathy Coefficient) scale. People with zero degrees of empathy will be at one end of the bell curve and those with six degrees of empathy at the other end.

Being at the ends of the curve—extremely high or extremely low empathy scores—does not have to be pathological. Someone with zero degrees of empathy may not be a murderer, torturer or rapist:

Someone who’s very gifted at physics and focused on doing physics might not be interacting much with other people, but they are interacting with the world of objects. They might have low empathy but it’s not interfering. In that respect it’s not pathological and they don’t need a diagnosis. They have found a perfect fit between their mind and the lifestyle that they have.

People with autism or Asperger’s syndrome are zero-positive in Baron-Cohen’s terminology—there is something positive in their lack of empathy. They have zero empathy but are drawn to patterns, regularity and consistency, and so follow rules and regulations like the patterns of civic life. Others are called “zero-negative” because they have no such positive aspects. Zero-negative people are the pathological group—people with borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder (psychopaths) and narcissistic personality disorder. They are capable of inflicting physical and psychological harm on others and are unmoved by the plight of those they hurt.

Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don’t work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness. Other people’s thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. It leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious of other people’s feelings and thoughts but oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100% in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong, or stupid.

Did people with these personality disorders lose their empathy or were they born that way? There is a hormonal link to empathy. One of Baron-Cohen’s studies showed that the more testosterone a foetus has in the womb, the less empathy the child will have when born. Excess testosterone correlates negatively with empathy, and testosterone is obviously more common in men than women. Men therefore score lower on empathy than women. Moreover, another study revealed four genes associated with empathy—one sex steroid gene, one gene related to social emotional behaviour and two associated with neural growth.

Even so, John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, showed that children with “insecure attachment”—a lack of opportunity to form a strong bond with a caregiver—are more at risk of delinquency, personality disorders related to lack of empathy leading to an excessive self centeredness.

Psychopaths and narcissists each are less than one per cent of the population, but many people, close to the majority, supported or at least did not oppose the big atrocities of history like the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the slave trade, Stalin’s purges, Rwandan genocide, apartheid, and so on. Beliefs seem to be a bigger cause of evil than biology. Negative propaganda spread by church or state about an outgroup thoroughly dehumanises them, leaving them open to inhuman violence. Baron-Cohen says;

Whatever your causes of loss of empathy, it’s the very same empathy circuit that would be involved when you show empathy or fail to show empathy.

So, not everyone who has low empathy will act cruelly. There is more to behavior considered as evil than a zero degree of empathy, and improving empathy by treatment does not seem to have much effect. Psychopaths are notoriously untreatable, as are children who have callousness/unemotional (CU) trait. Increasing the empathy of sex offenders is also difficult. Although zero degrees of empathy seems necessary for callousness, several additional factors and experiences also may lead to cruel or callous acts.

Nevertheless, science is beginning to unravel the mystery of why some people have less empathy than others and the implications are potentially far reaching, not least for the criminal justice system:

Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world. It might even have relevance for politics and politicians, so that when we try and resolve conflict, whether it’s domestic conflict or international conflict, issues about empathy might actually be useful. Given this assertion, it is puzzling that in the school curriculum empathy figures hardly at all, and in politics, business, the courts or policing it is rarely if ever on the agenda. We can see examples among our political leaders of the value of empathy, as when Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk sought to understand and befriend each other, crossing the divide in Apartheid South Africa, but the same has not yet been achieved between Israel and Palestine, or between Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan. And, for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are lost.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen adds:

The hallmark of a compassionate and civilised society is that we try to understand other people’s actions, we don’t try to simply condemn them. There is even a question about whether a person that commits an awful crime should be in a prison as opposed to a hospital. When people commit crimes, there may be determinants of their behaviour which are outside their control. No one is responsible for their own genes.

The punitive right wing Christian will argue that God gave us free will, and so we are all able to make moral choices. Lack of any sense of empathy is no excuse. But it is rather like expecting someone who is red-green color blind to press the red alert button when danger threatens. There is indeed a choice, but they cannot distinguish the right one. Of course, most neocon Christians are so lacking in empathy themselves that they cannot comprehend that their perpetual habit of attacking foreign people shows their utter lack of empathetic feeling of any kind. They are zero negative—psychopaths—but think they are quite normal, even special in God’s eyes!

Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with the neighbour. Unlike the arms industry that costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison service and legal system that cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And, unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Sources: the Independent and the Observer.

Brian Cox, the celebrity particle physicist and professor at The University of Manchester, says at Science and Religion Today that he’s fighting maniacs not religion. Brian is the former rock star astronomer who presents science and astronomy features on TV.

There is a lot of goodwill toward scientists among the religious communities in this country. I met the dean of Guildford Cathedral when I was an atheist on a panel and we… became good friends. I also recently got invited to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s house because he liked “Wonders of the Solar System”. Rowan Williams is a very thoughtful man. If you want to move society forward in a more rational direction, religious leaders can be useful because they share that view.

Brian Cox admits he considers it quite acceptable to be anti-Creationism—his anti-maniac—but being “anti-religion is not helpful”. Maniacs ignore all the scientific evidence that the world was created more than four billion years ago, and choose to believe—on no more evidence than that someone told them the bible is the word of God—that it says the world was made only 6,000 years ago. It is all right to say such a one is an idiot, or is insane, but trying to wage an atheistic war against all religion is an effort that ought not to be made.

One imagines that there must be more to justify Cox’s position, but this blog does not give it, so it appears there as a rather poor argument. Maybe the battle need not always be fought whenever a scientist meets a cleric, but it is only a polite suspension of battle orders for social reasons. Brian has met a couple of pleasant clergymen who are not as strident as the Discovery Institute at plugging Genesis, so we ought to abandon essential scientific principles in future contact with such nice old codgers. Old fashioned Church of England clergymen still consider nice to be part of their job description. Anglicans used to be generally nice, they were famously tolerant, but now the Evangelicals have taken over!

Brian Cox is skipping differences that cannot be reconciled between science and religion as world outlooks:

• Religion requires gullible people to be able to sell nonsense. Science requires skeptical people to question everything.
• Science honestly deals with the material world of observable phenomena, and the consequences of it. Religion is no different, but dishonestly pretends to deal with a fancied supernatural world, and invisible things.
• Science only considers acceptable what has been repeatedly tested and confirmed. Religion tells tall stories such as that of the eternal life after death, as if they were absolute truth, though no clergyman knows these stories to be true. Again, it is dishonesty.

Had Brian tried engaging his clerical chums in a serious discussion of metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, he must inevitably have ended up exasperated. They can no longer admit that much of the allegedly ancient parts of the bible—Christians seem to believe the bible is God’s timeline, like a divine diary—is mythical, and indeed has been shown to be substantially the same as even older myths from other Ancient Near Eastern countries like Babylonia. Their members, already getting thin on the ground and increasingly fundamentalist and intolerant force them to spout the inerrant line, or try to hedge their bets so as not to offend one side or other of the battle within Anglican ranks.

Brian Cox should take care whom he trusts. Many an innocent traveler has walked along a lonely road with someone they did not know, and woken up sore, cold and walletless. The footpad might not be the present Archbishop of Canterbury or Bishop of Guildford, but to think that men who put their own trust in a figment, and opportunistically will take the most convenient line to keep their congregations rather than correcting their false ideas, will not metaphorically mug you is pure naïveté.

Dr Alex Sinclair, director of programs in Israel Education for the Jewish Theological Seminary, writing in Ha Aretz says:

Orthodox Judaism is, at its core, wrong. Orthodox Judaism is built around a narrative that contains a foundational error—“The Torah was written by God and given to Moses on Mount Sinai”. This statement, and the orthodox religious narrative that emerges from it, has been disproven by generations of Biblical scholars, archaeologists, sociologists of religion, and historians. These scholars have demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt”, in the late Rabbi Louis Jacobs’ words, that the traditional, orthodox understanding of Jewish history is false. The origins of Judaism are much more complicated than that.

Why, then, allow discredited beliefs to stay dominant in the Jewish world? Why not censure it when it is repeated in public without censure? Why stay silent before those who believe it, rather than expose the untenability of their position? He suggests three reasons why Jews stay silent, allowing falsehood to be freely repeated:

1. The Orthodox narrative is the main rationale behind Israel’s mistaken settlement enterprise of the past 40 years—“God gave us this land”. Fundamentalist orthodox ideology is based on historically incorrect claims and doubtful assumptions about Jewish history. The fundamentalist narrative that the Jewish people’s historical connection with the land of Israel is divinely ordained, and the subsequent use of that divine narrative to justify political actions are wrong.
2. The fear of Jewish disunity. Jews believe it important to be united, so allow orthodox beliefs to become the Jewish norm, being scared to say opinions are “wrong” or “false”, nodding assent to be nice rather than speaking the truth. In fact, Orthodox Judaism will destroy Jewish unity. Orthodox Jews ignore liberal Jews’ concerns, discriminate against their converts, insult their rabbis, and used their money against them—yet they still smile back at them a rictus smile.
3. The concern about assimilation. The hope is that the false narrative might help keep Jews Jewish. The argument ought to be that Jewishness is a wonderful and enriching way to live life. Jews ought not to sacrifice truth for Jewish continuity.

Liberal Jews must be more prepared to dispute the fundamentalist orthodox position in dialogue with their orthodox friends. A movement of Jews is needed which is no longer prepared to remain quiet and cede Jewishness to a fundamentalist, incorrect orthodox narrative. They must take the first steps towards it.

12 February is Darwin Day, the day when Charles Darwin was born in 1809. It commemorates Darwin, his remarkable scholarship and science in general, the methodical application of human curiosity and ingenuity to benefit us all.

Charles Darwin published his seminal book, On the Origin of Species in 1859. In it he laid out the evidence for natural selection as the mechanism behind biological evolution. The idea of evolution was already in the air. It was not evolution that Darwin discovered, but a feasible mechanism by which it could occur.

It was similar to the way even schoolchildren a hundred years ago could wonder at the way the South American and African continents seemed to fit each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces, as if the two continents had split apart and separated. It looked obvious, and geological features fitted too. But no one could figure out how massive volumes of rock—whole continents—could move. So, the theory of continental drift was pooh-poohed by many who discarded any notion that could not be explained.

Now it is accepted, just as evolution is, unless you are a Christian fundamentalist, because it has an explanation—plate tectonics, the fact that the continents are floating on molten masma. Darwin similarly allowed evolution to be accepted because he had an explanation for it.

Darwin proposed that all living beings—including humans—were related! Life is one enormous family—a kinunity! It means we are all descended from a common ancestor, far back in time. Though the idea that all of life are linked by family bonds sounds very spiritual or religious to some, the Christian fundamentalists want to be personally created by God, and not be in a mighty living family, even though they could continue to believe that this familial arrangement of life was God’s own doing! It does not actually match what their real God, the inerrant bible, says.

Religious fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, so they oppose evolution. Genesis has God specifically making Adam out of earth and Eve out of Adam, and it must be so, even though it is manifestly a myth, because the inerrant bible is… well, inerrant! However absurd the myths in it, like the three mile deep flood, the talking ass, the star that moves and stops and starts and ends over a stable, the earth stopping from rotating, the contradictions, etc, etc, it is inerrant, full stop. Humans were specially created out of red mud, and evolution must be wrong—not just wrong, evil! Yet a silent majority of Christians find nothing in evolution to object to. A Chicago Lutheran pastor, the Rev Steve Swanson, says:

It’s hard to believe that fundamentalism has taken such deep roots in our culture, but it has.

A Presbyterian pastor adds that religious believers think science will destroy their faith, but that scientists think religious belief interferes with the teaching and practice of science:

It’s important to have a dialogue and show these fears aren’t necessary.

Sadly, the religious opposition to evolution shows that it is indeed impeding the teaching of it, and even some pastors are alarmed by that. The consequences of turning away from science could be disastrous to the future of our civilization. The Rev Swanson thought it was important to confront the impression that creationism is necessary for Christian belief, and that all pastors believe in it. Christians had to be loud and clear in pronouncing that creationism is not science and also that it is bad religion. Unless they do, people will think creationism is necessary for Christian belief.

It ought to be plain that, given that God meant to transmit into human minds the reality of creation 2500 years ago, it could not be done. If it were done, it had to be in terms that people this long ago could comprehend. It had to be done in myths, for that is how people thought at that time. Now the believer can call them allegories or metaphors, if they think the word “myth” is demeaning.

Christians who remain puzzled, can look up Michael Zimmerman’s the Clergy Letter Project, which has collected 12,000 signatures of vicars who oppose creationism. They think intelligent design or creationism is not science and cannot be taught as science in public schools, as American creationists want.

Who is the best known modern scientist?

We might easily think it is Richard Dawkins from all the abuse he gets from Christians in the US. Nearly all US citizens are Christians we are told, but most of them haven’t a clue about their own bible, according to a Pew Poll. So maybe it isn’t surprising that few of them have ever heard of Dawkins either, or any scientist at all! 83 percent of US people cannot correctly name even one modern scientist. 65 percent cannot even think of the name of a living scientist, and 18 percent more try but fail to get it right. Many think Bill Gates and Al Gore are scientists.

It is because so many people are ignorant of science, even though we are surrounded by its benefits, that governments have to finance it. The great god Mammon, aka capitalism, fails to support science because:

1. it is a high cost investment
2. with a high risk of producing nothing certain in a short time, but rather yields commercial results only slowly
3. so overall there is no certainty investment in it will have a sufficiently high rate of return.

Typically, the Right Reds, the Tea Parties, the Republicans, for whom ignorance is bliss, and prejudice heaven, will support research on defense but not medical matters. They hate people being cured except themselves. So why not cut out all government medical research as a wasteful indulgence. Sure, enough, in their “Pledge to America”, they will reduce federal spending on science unless it is for defense. The namby-pamby National Institutes of Health’s budget could drop 9.1 percent to $28.5 billion. Other science agencies, like the National Science Foundation, will suffer similarly.

Meryl Comer and Chris Mooney at PhysOrg.com remind us of philanthropist, Mary Lasker, who used to remark:

If you think research is expensive, try disease!